Tuesday, October 26, 2010

"Þæt is nu hraðost to secganne, þæt ic wilnode weorðfullice to libbanne þa hwile þe ic lifede, and æfter minum life þæm monnum to læfanne þe æfter me wæren min gemyndig on godum weorcum.""I desired to live worthily as long as I lived, and to leave after my life, to the men who should come after me, the memory of me in good works."King Alfred the Great, in his translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

The politicians who today are Alfred’s successors in power may be remembered for many things but good works are unlikely to feature in the list. Yesterday it was reported that Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East, had been cautioned for breaking electoral law. Despite having qualified as a solicitor, Ms McCarthy chose to reveal on Twitter the number of postal votes cast per party in the 2010 election, contrary to the Representation of the People Act 1983.

A caution is a paltry punishment for breaking the secrecy of the poll ahead of its close. The crime is less of a surprise. Lying and cheating are tools that come with the red rosette, tools embraced with glee by those so keen to win that they long ago lost any idea of why they should want to. They are what we expect of a party that lacks moral conviction, that doubts its ability to win by fair means, that secretly recognises the emptiness of its rhetoric, the contradictions of its message, the pointlessness of its existence when, win or lose, the consequences are the same.

We are a radical party, the natural heirs to the Common Wealth tradition, of co-operation as the basis of economics, democracy as the basis of society and morality as the basis of politics. We share a long-standing disappointment that the Labour Party rejects all of these things in favour of money markets, control freakery and ends-justify-the-means. Some seemed seduced by Blair’s bleating about the forces of conservatism, before the fleece fell off to reveal a lupine arch-privatiser and curtailer of civil liberties. Not us. This is Labour’s heritage, back to the first Fabian imperialists and later apologists for Stalin. The real sheep are those who think they can only vote for one of the three identikit parties of the establishment. Ed Miliband for PM? ? Why?

The campaign to allow MPs to continue to represent real communities, shaped by geography, history and culture, has a growing following. It even has its own Facebook page.

The so-called ‘Conservative’ Party and its glove-puppet partners remain steadfastly committed to ripping up our history in the name of ‘fairness’. It really is no defence to say that ‘fairness’ must outweigh sentiment, as the boundaries of Scotland and Wales are to be protected while others of much greater antiquity are not. It is claimed that the constitutional history of the Union and of its constituent parts has to be respected. We do not disagree. But what of England’s internal history?

In Wessex, our shires have shaped the lives of 40 generations and more. For our politicians, such community ties seemingly count for nothing. For them, England is one vast canvas dotted with millions of interchangeable voting units. The localities and regions that came together – under Wessex leadership – to form the nation are there to be scrubbed out.

There is no doubting that there is a mandate for change, though by no means all areas will have voted for it. The Conservative manifesto pledged to "ensure every vote will have equal value by introducing ‘fair vote’ reforms to equalise the size of constituency electorates, and conduct a boundary review to implement these changes within five years". (Always read the small print before casting your vote!) Yet concessions have already been made. A few glove puppets in the north of Scotland representing large territories with sparse populations are cosily protected from the proposals. Special geographical circumstances elsewhere – such as the Isle of Wight – are not recognised and ought to be. ‘Equalisation’ has been defined as within 5%. Why not 10% and allow even more of those special geographical circumstances the room to breathe?

Last week MPs debated the clause that all this fuss is about. Amendments were tabled. And never discussed. So much time was spent talking about the reduction in the number of MPs – from 650 to 600 – that they never got around to the territorial issue. The amendments went in the bin.

So much for the ‘Mother of Parliaments’. If this is the standard of procedure we hold up as a model to the rest of the world you can stuff it. Mount it in a glass case. And give us back the power to make our own decisions in Wessex before common sense is affronted any further.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Cornish patriots are gathering today beneath the Tamar Bridge at Saltash to protest against the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. There is even serious talk of hunger strikes. What is it that has brought this on?

The Bill paves the way for a referendum next May on replacing First-Past-The-Post with the Alternative Vote system. So far so good; Single Transferable Vote is a better system still but at least things are moving in the right direction.

The same cannot be said for the Bill’s other components. One implements David Cameron’s pledge to cut the number of MPs. Nearly one in ten seats will go. In light of the snouts-in-trough expenses scandal the public will not mourn their passing, even though a Parliament with fewer MPs will undoubtedly require more staff if they are to do the same job. The truth is that this move does not so much respond to the public mood as exploit it. The real reason for cutting the number of MPs is to cut the chances of a successful backbench rebellion. There are no plans to devolve decision-making to powerful regional Parliaments, such as the one we demand for Wessex. Ministers’ in-trays will remain as full as ever and so the number of Ministers will not be cut. Thus a larger proportion of the reformed House than currently will be on the Government payroll, their loyalty bought and the ability of the legislature to hold the executive to account correspondingly curtailed.

Hand-in-hand with fewer MPs comes a comprehensive re-drawing of constituency boundaries, with the margins for flexibility severely reduced. Stubborn geography gives way to even more stubborn statistics. Already we have seen some very silly constituencies that add one town to part of another and join them up with a slab of countryside in between. An obsession with numerical equality will deliver much more of this. It is the kind of obsession that in 1969 had the Royal Commission on Local Government recommend merging the Isle of Wight with Portsmouth. It is the kind of obsession that has the Cornish deeply worried. After 700 years as a Parliamentary county, Cornwall could be sharing some of its MPs with areas in Wessex. Which makes life very difficult for a nationalist party like Mebyon Kernow. It makes life very difficult for us too. And we face the prospect not only of a Devonwall constituency but of others like it right around our borders. Get set for Herecestershire, Oxhamptonshire, Berkrey and Hampsex.

At one level, this disregard for counties is just part of a sloppy modern trend, recently marked by Royal Mail’s moves to phase-out their use for postal purposes. At another, it is deeply ideological, the playing-out of a long-standing Jacobin desire to eradicate all intermediate identities that come between the State and the individual. Consider how Cameron’s new-style MPs will actually set about their work. Representing a meaningless area, a block of voters randomly generated, they can no longer act as advocates of the local and particular but must confine themselves to being the conduit between national politics and the atomised constituent.

The Cameron/Clegg axis of evil talks about promoting ‘community’ in the abstract while destroying it in the concrete, rounding on the very people who elected them. It may seem ‘fairer’ to insist that every constituency is exactly the same size, even where that means over-riding the views of local people on how they wish to be represented in their Parliament. Indeed, it is one of the demands made by the Chartist reformers in the 1830’s and one of only two that has yet to be enacted. But to think in these terms is to give Parliament an exalted status it has never deserved. Parliament should not be an assembly of directly-elected individuals representing blocks of 100,000 people each. It should be, in the ancient tradition, a gathering of the self-governing estates of the realm, to co-ordinate, not to rule. Localities should govern themselves, and regions should be the means to co-ordinate activities over a wider area. In a world turned the right way up, the very idea of ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’ over a subject people will be laughable. It will not matter how many people an MP represents because every single representative – or, rather, delegate – will have an unlimited right of veto so far as his or her own territory is concerned. Out-voting will be out-moded.

One of the ancient traditions still preserved in elections to Parliament is the issue and return of the writs. The instruction to hold an election in each constituency is issued by the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery to the High Sheriff (in county constituencies) and the Mayor or Lord Mayor (in borough constituencies), as it has been since the first Parliaments were summoned. The writ is returned with the name of the successful candidate endorsed. That is why the sheriff or mayor formally returning the writ is known as the Returning Officer, and why the local authority chief executive who oversees the day-to-day administration is known as the Acting Returning Officer. For some, including the Electoral Commission, this tradition is written off dismissively as ‘plainly redundant’ and ‘confusing’ to the general public but in truth is a harmless part of our heritage.

How this tradition will fare in a system where constituencies no longer match the geography of counties and boroughs has yet to be seen. A foretaste appears in a recent report from the Electoral Commission, who were tasked with finding out why long queues developed at certain polling stations back in May, with the result that many voters were unable to cast their votes before the polls closed. The brief seems straightforward. Find out what the Acting Returning Officer had done or had failed to do. Organisation of the poll was the responsibility of the local authority and no-one else. Yet the Commission could not resist slipping in to their report a call for radical reform, including the abolition of the ceremonial role of sheriffs and mayors, a role that has no bearing whatsoever on the issue under investigation.

We wrote to the Commission’s Chair, Jenny Watson, protesting at this deep lapse from professionalism. Ms Watson replied at length, singing the praises of her organisation but failing utterly to address the point. Such is the New Labour bureaucracy, hiding its ignorance of history and its lack of intellectual rigour behind a figleaf of patronising insouciance. For Watson, the electoral system is a creaking Victorian structure on its last legs. To anyone with brains it is obvious that the system worked well enough for the Victorians and any shortcomings today must therefore be laid at the door of the current generation of know-nothings. Well-crafted legislation is being picked apart by people whose blindspots appear deliberate and equally well-crafted. The expansion of postal voting has been accompanied by an explosion in electoral fraud. The Victorians could have told you it would.

We have been involved in elections for over 35 years and have seen the downward spiral as costs are cut and corners with them. Ballot box security will be the next area to go as plastic and cardboard replace steel and as stock-market pressure for early declarations means seals that can be applied and removed more swiftly. And all the time, the Electoral Commission fiddles while Rome burns, childishly proposing new laws because it cannot grasp how it is that the current ones are those that work best in current circumstances. The defence of democracy will be no thanks to that bunch of third-rate sociologists but rather to those who understand how we got where we are and how easy it can be to slide back again.

The pieces of the jigsaw are falling into place. First came the Electoral Commission, its role ostensibly to police political parties, in fact to agitate aggressively for the aggrandisement of its own powers. Now comes the breaking of the centuries-old link between the counties and their ‘knights of the shire’. Next will come the clamour to tidy-up the resulting anomalies. Why should local authorities be involved in running elections when their boundaries diverge so radically from those of the constituencies assigned to them to administer? The Electoral Commission’s final triumph will be when it is placed in charge of the entire process, directed by a tightly-knit group of politically motivated men and women from an office in central London. Everything from the registration of parties and voters to the casting and counting of votes. And then the stage will be set for State-sponsored electoral fraud on a scale to make even Robert Mugabe appear whiter than white.

We do not argue that Wessex is not English but we do argue that there is a debate to be had about the governance of England. A unified England is a centralised England – in many ways still a Norman England – and one that in practice is run largely for London's benefit, not ours.

Take the Olympic Games, to be held in London in 2012, for the third time. No other UK city has ever hosted the games, yet provincial cities elsewhere have (Barcelona being the prime example that is still looked up to).

According to a recent report in the Financial Times (a London newspaper), preparations for the games have delivered a publicly funded bonanza for companies in London and the South East but other areas are deriving meagre benefits. Companies based in London have won more than £2.7 billion of contracts, more than half the total £5.1 billion so far spent by the Olympic Delivery Authority. Looking at the other Prescott zones, we find that South East companies won contracts worth £805 million and those in eastern England £719 million. Companies in the North East and South West won just £9 million each. Distance is not the deciding factor: the North West won £97 million and Scotland £23 million.

The ODA claimed contracts had filtered down to companies outside London through sub-contracts: "DirectODA contracts are the tip of the iceberg and there are hundreds of sub-contracts going to businesses through the UK-wide supply chains." However, it could not provide any evidence to support this claim, citing confidentiality.

Sure, London council tax payers are footing a slice of the bill. But so are we all. In 2005, when London won the Olympic bid, Seb Coe pledged that the games would "providea unique opportunity for businesses of all shapes and sizes across the UK, providing essential goods and services for this historic event." Reality seems to differ.